Press "Enter" to skip to content

Day: July 4, 2017

Agorics

One of my interests about a decade ago was agorics, the study of computational markets.  Mark S. Miller and K. Eric Drexler pushed this idea in the late 1990s and collected a fair portion of the work on the topic on Drexler’s website.  A sample from the section on computation and economic order:

Trusting objects with decisions regarding resource tradeoffs will make sense only if they are led toward decisions that serve the general interest-there is no moral argument for ensuring the freedom, dignity, and autonomy of simple programs. Properly-functioning price mechanisms can provide the needed incentives.

The cost of consuming a resource is an opportunity cost-the cost of giving up alternative uses. In a market full of entities attempting to produce products that will sell for more than the cost of the needed inputs, economic theory indicates that prices typically reflect these costs.

Consider a producer, such as an object that produces services. The price of an input shows how greatly it is wanted by the rest of the system; high input prices (costs) will discourage low-value uses. The price of an output likewise shows how greatly it is wanted by the rest of the system; high output prices will encourage production. To increase (rather than destroy) value as ‘judged by the rest of the system as a whole’,a producer need only ensure that the price of its product exceeds the prices (costs) of the inputs consumed. This simple, local decision rule gains its power from the ability of market prices to summarize global information about relative values.

 

I still think it’s an interesting concept, and the rise of cloud computing has, to an extent, fulfilled this idea:  AWS spot pricing is one of the best examples I know of, where resource spot prices will change depending upon load.

Comments closed

HASSP

Drew Furgiuele wants to put SQL Server into space.  I’ve linked to the entire series thus far, which has been fun to follow.  Here’s an excerpt from his latest post:

That’s from the “Hardware and Software Requirements for Installing SQL Server” product page.  I’ve had people ask if I was using a Raspberry Pi, or some other Micro ATX PC. The answer is neither; the problem with a Pi is that it’s not a 64-bit processor. Pis use ARM architecture, and SQL Server doesn’t (yet) support ARM. Also, most Pi 3’s run at 1.2Ghz and only support 1GB of RAM. As for MicroATX form factor PCs, they’re closer to what we’d need, but they’re still heavy. Plus, you’d need a pretty substantial power supply that we couldn’t (safely) support that high up in the sky. Even if you stripped it down to bare components, it’d be pushing it.

There are companies that make small SoC solutions, but after evaluating them we determined that they were either pretty flaky or got so hot they risked bursting into flames even just booting into Windows. Instead, we found a really unique piece of hardware: the Intel Joule.

Comments closed

No Curation Today

Happy 4th of July.  Because today is a day for eating hot dogs and blowing stuff up, our normally scheduled curation is on hold.  We’ll pick up once more tomorrow.

In the meantime, stand by for a couple larger links.

Comments closed